Don Mann: Focusing on my Craft

Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003 - 2:35 p.m.

I can justify my diary in one simple quote from George Santayana;

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

If I have a comprehensive diary detailing my emotions and states of mind throughout my various misadventures, I can better learn from past experience.

Last night I drove to my old house in Pembroke, parked my truck nearby, and sat on the old familiar boulder across the street. I sat there staring at my old abode, the place where the last five years of my development from a boy to a man took place. Memories of walking home from school, that comforting knowledge of finally being home, my dogs recognizing my footstep and charging out from behind the house to greet me...

I stared at the dented part of the greyish blue siding of the garage, where I recalled so vividly how my father had been in a hurry leaving for work one morning and had scraped his van alongside it.

I looked at a small, straight crack along the whole bottom of the driveway, and a memory of carving a place for the invisible fence wire flooded my mind.

So much nostalgia washed over me as I sat on that rock, its icy surface almost as cold as the old house felt to me now, it was no longer home, it was just a photograph or a corpse of something that once felt very alive to me. Is this how an inanimate thing, a house or anything else, can truly die? I guess death really is more than stopping the heart, or blood becoming stagnant in stolid veins. Perhaps death is when the whole aura or spirit of something is gone.

I had fun driving home, looking at each of the houses and remembering the individuals who lived there, wondering what they were doing now. My mind's eye showed me a montage of imagined situations, like the ending of Donnie Darko, where everyone is reflecting on serious issues and conflicting internally...or maybe just pondering some age-old question like what life has in store for them, where their future will take them...or maybe their all asleep and I should be focusing on the road.

Delve Into The Past - Onward Into The Future